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Want to know something that might bend your brain a little? I’m not typing this blog post. I am speaking it aloud into my phone, and a nifty app is transcribing my words.

Say wh-what?!
I know, right?

There was this one issue I was having that was getting on my nerves.

You see, 99.9% of my ideas come to me in the shower when I’m busy, you know, showering. I’ve seen those waterproof pads you can get, but our water goes cold very quickly so I don’t want to use up the hot water with soap suds still to wash away. These ideas evolve and grow wings as I’m getting ready for the day – sometimes I have a fully-written newsletter, blog post or book concept sitting in my mind. By the time I reach my laptop, the ideas have started to fizzle away, and I’m left trying to capture the tails of them and pull them back. Fruitlessly, I may add. It’s not only frustrating but it also injects a level of urgency to get to my laptop in a bid to capture the inspiration while it’s hot.

Blog Posts At The Speed Of Sound: Unlock The Potential Of Speech-to-Text Writing Share on X

Last week, I found myself reminiscing about when I was training to be an accountant. The senior accountants would use a dictaphone to record letters to clients, which the secretaries would then type up. My train of thought went along these lines:

“I could use that old dictaphone in the cupboard to capture my ideas in the morning.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t be bothered to then listen to it and type-up what I’ve said.”

“I need a secretary…”

“Surely my phone has voice notes… Jo said that’s how she wrote one of her books – by speaking it”

It turns out you totally can use your phone as a dictaphone and a secretary! In fact, there are lots of ways to do it. Some I tried and didn’t like. Others sounded a little too complicated. I finally settled on this:

Google GBoard

After doing some research, I installed Gboard because it had an option for ‘faster voice typing’. If you’ve heard me speak, you’ll know I talk fast. This felt like a marriage made in heaven – I could still speak naturally, and an app could keep up. Not only that, but this app is highly accurate. It’s actually astounding how much it captures and how well it captures. Over time, it starts to recognise your speech patterns, so it gets better and better with time.

Once you install the app – as long as you have turned ‘voice typing’ in the app’s options on – you can click on the microphone option on your keyboard, and it’ll turn your speech into text wherever you want to write. Yup, that’s right, you can do this in text messages to friends, in draft emails, in Instagram captions, or wherever you might ordinarily type something.

Helpful hint: Be sure to say “full stop” at the end of your sentences. You can say “new paragraph”, “comma”, “semi-colon”, etc., and it’ll action those formatting and grammatical cues.

Google Drive

Because I’m always nervous about losing things in the cloud, I prefer to have copies of my blog posts in my Google Drive. That’s also where I prefer to edit my blog posts; it feels more intuitive and less clunky than it does in WordPress directly. With that in mind, I dictated this blog post to a Google Doc on my phone and edited it on the Google Doc once I was in front of my laptop – my phone and laptop are synced. You could dictate your draft blog posts straight into WordPress if you want to skip copying and pasting from Google Docs to WordPress. However, you will still need to edit the blog post before you can publish it.

Please note: Google Docs does have an inbuilt dictation feature if you’re on a desktop and are using Chrome. I’m on a MacBook so it doesn’t work for me on there and it doesn’t work on mobile devices either.

Easy Peasy Content Creation

This is now my favourite way of creating and capturing those draft blog posts which seemingly appear out of nowhere as I’m getting ready for the day ahead. It gives me the chance to capture the energy and essence of my ideas as they come in – when I’m feeling most inspired. It feels like I’m working to my strengths in using this methodology and it eradicates that sinking feeling when an idea has slipped through your fingers. I’m having these ideas, and I’m getting ready, and I’m dictating a draft blog post.